Triangle
by etcetera-cat
Summary: A body in the desert seems to be nothing more than an overspill from a local gang dispute, and is dismissed as such, but then a second body is found and a mystery begins to form...
1. The Sleeper in the Leaves

**Disclaimer:** More's the pity, but I absolutely do not own anything relating to _CSI: Crime Scene Investigation_. That pleasure goes to CBS... Actually, it's probably less the pity as their screen writers have better plot ideas than I could ever come up with...

**Notes:** A venture into an entirely new fandom for me... I'm strangely un-nerved as there's no magic. Or talking animals. Or sparkly things. I apologise in advance for any glaring continuity errors, complete OOC portrayals and/or anything else. Sometimes I hate my brain for dreaming what it does.

**Triangle.**

**Chapter One- The Sleeper in the Leaves.**

The sharp-edged beam of the torch light threw wavering shadows around as it tracked back and forth in a counterpoint to tired male voice. For his part, Brass was profoundly wishing- despite still oving his job- that this call could have come in ten minutes later. Ten minutes later and he would have been safely clocked out and heading home to bed and a hot shower, not necessarily in that order.

"Who called it in?" Grissom's voice was distracted as he added his torch light to Brass's, cold halogen light pouring down the steep bank at the side of the road, focused on the crumpled remains of a human being.

"Pair of kids," Brass snorted, jerking his head in the direction of the parked beat car, its red and blue lights still silently strobing, and the huddled pair standing in front of it. "Apparently, he couldn't wait for the next gas station to relieve himself; pulled over on the hard shoulder to take a leak and found himself staring down at one very dead body."

"Hmm," Grissom didn't say anything more, merely glancing over at the unfortunate finder of the body and his girlfriend, before returning his attention to the scene at the bottom of the ditch. A pause, during which several crickets, fooled by the harsh artificial lights, began tentative chirping. "Get Warrick to interview them when he gets here, I'll process the victim."

Brass watched Grissom carefully as he pulled on latex gloves, picked up his field kit and then walked a short distance along the bank so that he wasn't potentially destroying evidence as he climbed down and then watched him until he'd made the bottom, feet sinking into long dead leaves. There was no sign of the tiredness that Brass himself felt-- and he knew for a fact that the graveyard shift supervisor must _also_ be feeling-- in Grissom's bearing or attitude. A stifled sigh of irritation and the detective turned around, sourly noting the way that the imminent rising of the sun was painting the eastern sky with oranges and purples before flicking off his torch.

"He's like a machine sometimes, man." Warrick Brown's soft observation announced his presence, as did the muted crunch of his shoes on the gravel lining the side of the road. "I take it I'm interviewing the lucky finders?" He nodded at the pair that Brass had indicated before. The girl was crying. silent tracks that ran unheeded from the corners of her eyes and caught the conflicting colours of light with bright flashes. Her boyfriend had one arm around her shoulders, but seemed unable to muster up any more comfort than that. Despite the red lights to one side of him, his face seemed pale, almost colourless.

Brass nodded. "Gris is processing the victim." He said.

"So what do we know about the vic so far?"

"Dead. In a ditch in the middle of nowhere. In the desert." The succinct reply was accompanied by a weary shrug as Brass and Warrick began walking over to the shell-shocked couple.

Any reply that the CSI may have had in mind segued effortlessly into an introduction to the 'lucky finders'. "Warrick Brown, criminalistics; this is Captain Brass from Homicide. I'd like to ask you a few questions, if I may?" An easy, understated smile followed the flashing of Warrick's ID. "First off, if I could have your names?"

The girl was first to speak, one hand raised to run through lank blonde hair that was beginning to snarl into a knotted mess, catching her fingers briefly, before red-rimmed and puffy eyes-- the bright red of the veins clashing horribly with the pale blue of the irises-- were raised to stare blankly at the pair of law officers. "Kirsty... Kirsty Henshaw," her voice sounded rough and worn.

The sound of it stirred a reaction from the young man holding her and he blinked glazed eyes, not quite managing to focus on either Brass or Warrick. "Jonny-John Ledbacker." The acrid smell of alcohol on his breath was obvious and almost overpowering and Warrick resisted the urge to step backwards. The captain screwed his face up in disgust as a wayward breeze scudded the tail-end of the exhalation in his direction.

"I was driving," Kirsty's hand made another stalling circuit of her hair, raking it back from her face, as she correctly interpreted Brass's expression.

"And you stopped so John could go to the bathroom?" Warrick deftly intercepted her before she could go off on a premature tangent and steered the conversation back on track. "Did you notice anything strange at all?"

"Apart from the fricking dead body?" A harsh cough followed the question and Ledbacker, expression angry and confused at the same time, swayed in place slightly. "I don' feel so good," he muttered, a faint slur overlaying his words.

His girlfriend winced. "We... we were at a housewarming party... a friend from university... Jonny got into a drinking game with some of the others, he's... not usually like this." The explanation was garbled and punctuated by a snort from Ledbacker.

"Jus' 'cause I'm drunk don't mean I can't explain myself, Kirsty." The faint belligerence of the statement was undermined by another stumble, this one ending up with the young man sitting ungracefully down on the ground, head bowed and face pale with cold sweat. "Really don't feel good." Warrick and Brass exchanged a silent look over the drunken man's head, before turning their attention back to Kirsty. Without the warm support of her boyfriend's arm resting on her shoulders she seemed smaller, more vunerable.

"Miss Henshaw?" Brass prompted, causing her to falter and glance between the police officer and her sick boyfriend.

"No, nothing strange at all... I thought I saw a coyote or something running across the road just before Jonny said he needed to go, but nothing else at all--" a shiver and the hand made it halfway up to her hairline before she changed her mind, instead wrapping both goose-fleshed arms around herself. The thin, brightly patterned cotton dress she was wearing was not suitable attire for standing around in a dawn-time desert.

Warrick knelt down, placing his field kit on the ground and rumaging in it. "What happens now?" Kirsty loked from the CSI to the detective and back again.

"One of the officers," Brass said, "will take a full statement from you and Mr. Ledbacker, and then we'll let you go on your way. We'll contact you if we need any further information."

"I also just need to collect some samples from you." Warrick levered himself up again, ignoring the dusty streaks now coating the front of his trousers, an ink pad and fingerprint cards in one gloved hand.

"S-samples?"

"Fingerprints, shoeprints, that's all." Warrick tried to make his voice reassuring as he showed her the ink pad, before moving to use the cooling bonnet of the squad car as an impromptu printing station. "If I could have you first, Miss Henshaw?"

The young woman nodded jerkily and moved forwards, standing uncertainly next to Warrick, until he gently took hold of her right hand and began rolling her finger-tips in the black ink and then onto the laid out print cards. She smelt of cigarette smoke and of alcohol-- Warrick couldn't entirely tell if the smell of drink was because she had also been drinking, or simply becuase she'd been sitting in the car with the well marinated Ledbacker. The tears that had still been occasionally leaking from her eyes had stopped now, leaving drying patches of sticky salt residue on her reddened cheeks and her face had begun to take on a dazed expression that the CSI recognised well; shock.

Kirsty shivered again and mindlessly began to pick at a loose thread on her dress, unaware of the smudged black marks her fingers were leaving on the material.

"If you wouldn't mind--" Warrick laid out a piece of thick paper on the ground and indicated for the woman to remove her shoes. She sighed, leaning against the fender of the police car to remove her left shoe. Warrick accepted the strappy, flat sandal and quickly rollered a thin layer of ink onto the sole, before pressing the shoe firmly to the paper. He handed the shoe back and repeated the process with the right sandal.

Once finished with her, he moved onto printing Ledbacker; this was accomplished by kneeling on the ground next to the drunken man and guiding his hands through all the motions. From the displaced look on his face and the distinct green tinge, his primary concerns were now that the drinks he'd had earlier were beginning to mount a counter-attack from the depths of his bowels. Waving on the final card to dry the ink faster, Warrick checked it over, then smoothed over the protective layer of sticky plastic, before placing the card into a pocket of his kit bag, along with the other cards.

"Your shoes Mr. Ledbacker?" Brass prompted the man, only to recieve a disinterested grunt in reply. Warrick shook his head and proceeded to print the man's shoes by the simple expediment of lifting up one foot at a time, inking the shoes, then placing a piece of paper under them. Once dry, the shoe prints were filed with the fingerprint cards.

Opening another pocket in the black case produced two paper tissues, which Warrick handed to Ledbacker and his girlfriend, before standing up.

The light on the horizon was starting to rival that of the hastily errected artifical lights dotted around the crime scene and Warrick easily picked his way between the assortment of law enforcement officers that always seemed to materialise around crimes, leaving behind Brass to assign a beat cop to taking statements from Henshaw and Ledbacker-- the former of whom was half-hearted rubbing at her ink-stained fingers with the paper tissue, and the latter of whom appeared to be fighting the urge to vomit.

_To vomit again._ Warrick amended the observation as he reached the top of the slight rise that led up to the dge of the bank, clear in the thick dust was the trail of Ledbacker's footprints-- one set fairly even and carefully placed and heading towards the ditch and the second set scuffed and hurried, as if Ledbacker had been running... or at least, stumbling at speed. The frothy puddle of vomit, already drying and lessening its acidic taint on the air was at the very edge of the bank, directly above the actual crime scene and to one side of a mashed up semi-circle of earth.

_So,_ Warrick tried to build up an image in his mind, _Kirsty pulls over to let Jonny go take a slash; he manages to get up towards the ditch--maybe shy of any other drivers getting an eyeful-- he reaches the edge, looks down... and gets an eyeful himself. At which point he heaves up a fraction of what he's drunk tonight, spins around, nearly falls over, and stumbles back to the car._ A slight smile of satisfaction crossed Warrick's face. _I wonder what Grissom's found?_

-----

Since making his way down into the ditch, Grissom had discovered several things. One; that the thick layer of dead leaves disguised an unpleasently stagnant attempt at a drying up stream, two; that he wasn't the first creature to have found the body, and three; this didn't appear to be the primary crime scene.

This third fact had been confirmed by the arrival of the coroner, who's liver temperature reading showed that the body was near to the ambient temperature of the surroundings, giving a rough time of death of two days ago. If the body had been in this ditch for that amount of time, then the local insect life should have already moved in and set up shop; as it was, there were only a few desolutry flies around the body-- early risers attracted by the smell of decomposition. The worst damage to the body was canid in origin, an oppurtunistic coyote had found this unexpected meal ticket and had liberally helped itself to the lower portion of the right leg.

Now, the coroner was standing well back, examining the stinking silt liberally covering his plastic-overshoe covered boots with an aura of morbid fascination, in direct contrast to the complete indifference he was exhibiting towards the dead body, and Gil had the crime scene to himself. First, he took pictures, the strobe light effect of the camera flash illuminating the pitiful remains from all angles; once satisfied that everything had been documented, the senior CSI replaced the expensive Nikon camera in its case and hunkered down to inspect the body.

The confused chirping of the crickets created an odd background score for the occasion; _Miogryllus lineatus-- the Western Striped Cricket._ If Grissom had been that way inclined, he would have hummed along to the insect music.

Young, black and male; those were the immediately obvious facts from looking at the body as it lay, sprawled on it's back, right arm outstetched, left curled into a rigored claw. The victim was also clad in a soiled tracksuit set- the trousers showing evidence of coyote damage and the thin jacket and underlying basketball vest marred by the explosive hole that punctured the clothing and the chest beneath them. _Single shot, fairly small caliber... looks through and through--_ Grissom paused to scan the area for any evidence of spent bullet casings, or even the fatal bullet, however unlikely it would be to find them here, away from the scene of the actual murder. _Stranger things have happened, though._ Being thorough was also an ingrained habit.

Nothing bullet like, or in any way related, presented itself. Attention returned to the body, Grissom carefully examined the outflung right hand, which was closest to him. The skin had a puffy, shiny appearence to it-- one that spoke of bacteria beginning to multiply beneath the surface-- and there appeared to be dirt under the broken fingernails. A metal curette was carefully used to gain scrapings from underneath all of the nails on the right hand, into a paper envelope. Hopefully, Trace would be able to find something important in the samples.

Right hand examined, Grissom circled the body to perform the same examination on the left hand-- although the whole of the left arm was curled in to the side of the body in a classic rigor mortis posture, it was apparent that the stiffness had left the decaying muscles of the corpse and gravity was the force responsible for keeping the limb in that position. The nails of this hand were in a similar state to those of its pair and Gil was able to obtain more scrapings which he bagged up carefully. That accomplished, the criminalist turned his attention back to the chest wound.

A frown fleeted across Grissom's lined face, and he leaned inwards, nose immune to the sweet metallic smell of decomposing blood, and examined the edges of the wound and-- more importantly-- the strange threads, or something similar to thread, that he could see imbedded in the splatter of gore. Delicate manipulation with a pair of forceps obtained Grissom a sample of the substance, to hold up close to his face, but whatever it was had too liberal a coating of blood to be visually identified. No matter; that was what the lab was for.

Once the mysterious threads had been allocated a bag of their own, Grissom stood up, leaning his head from side to side slightly in an attempt to release cramping neck muscles, and gestured to the coroner's assistant, who had ceased examining the microflora on his feet.

"Okay, that's enough, bag him up now," Grissom didn't wait for a reply, instead turning away from the body entirely and looking up to the edge of the ditch. The weed strewn bank, in a straight line down to where the body lay, was torn up, the plants dislodged to show bare earth... as if something had been rolled down the bank.

_A dump site._ A satisfied nod and Grissom cast his eyes up to the top of the bank, to where Warrick was looking down at him. "The body was dumped here."

"So we're looking for two scenes?" Warrick sounded unsurprised-- then again, most victims found in the desert had been killed elsewhere and then transported to their non-final resting places.

"That's what the evidence is telling us-- speaking of evidence, are there any viable shoe prints up there?" Grissom raised one hand to shade his eyes from the dawn light beginning to brighten the air behind Warrick.

Warrick smiled. "I knew you'd ask, so I already picked out the best ones and the plaster casts are drying at the moment. I also printed the lucky finder's shoes for matching. I'd say Mr Ledbacker's are a definite match however."

"Good." A slight nod and Grissom picked up his camera again. "Work the perimeter-- go each way down the bank for fifty yards, photo documentation-- I'll finish up processing here and then we can head back in."

Warrick sighed as he removed his camera from its protective case. "More overtime, hey?"

Grissom's camera whirred, clicked and then flashed. "Yes, Warrick, more overtime."


	2. Single Bullet Theory

**Disclaimer:** Any and everything pertaining to _CSI: Crime Scene Investigation_ belongs to CBS. I'm just slightly delusional and letting my imagination out to play...

**Notes:** This really is amusing me far more than I expected. I'm also bumping the rating up to an 'R'... I'm writing this at about a BBFC certificate 15 level (which is what _CSI: Crime Scene Investigation_ is over here in Blightly), but there isn't a comparable rating in the U.S. system used on So; fairly graphic, but not in a gratuitous or overly ghoulish fasion... I think...

**Triangle.**

**Chapter Two- Single Bullet Theory.**

"The extensive lividity markings along the dorsum and buttocks indicate that the body was laying on its back from the time of death up until just prior to removal to the dump site." The muted tapping of Doctor Robbin's walking stick underscored his opening words to Grissom as the senoir criminalist entered the refridgerated domain of the autopsy suite. "Good evening Gil."

"Evening," Grissom moved closer to the pathologist and the body laid out on the table, expression inquisitive. It was indeed the evening now-- Warrick and himself had stayed at the desert crime scene until the sun had cleared the edge of the horizon and the sky had turned a deep, day time blue, before finally calling it a day.

Warrick had left the lab before Grissom... had arrived back in just after the older CSI-- prompting a muttered comment about 'like a machine' that Gil didn't entirely understand... and was now firmly ensconced in one of the light box rooms comparing the footprints that he had obtained at the crime scene.

"Did you recover a bullet?" Grissom stopped a short distance from the autopsy table and gave Robbins an expectant look.

Robbins returned the look over the top of his wire framed glasses and shook his head slightly. "No, the shot was through and through--" a pair of mosquito forceps were used as impromptu indicators, "--entry was on the left side of the thorax, between the third and fourth ribs, the projectile tracked straight through and exited nominally on the right side." The pathologist leaned back and pointed with one hand at the first in a series of blown-up glossy photographs. The bright image centred and focused on the messy exit wound on the victim's back.

"As you can see the exit wound was close to the spine, between the fourth and fifth ribs. It actually blew clear the lateral spinous process of T5." The next photograph along showed, at the centre of Robbin's neat incisions, the remains of the fifth thoracic vertebrae; it's right side almost completely demolished. "The subsequent avulsion and displacement of bone and disc matter into the spinal column severed it completely-- the shock alone would have been a concievable cause of death." The harsh black and white monchrome of a radiograph film pinned on the illuminated viewer confirmed the pathologist's summation.

Grissom waited patiently. "However," Robbins continued, mosquito forceps pointing at the entry wound again, "the bullet also ripped through the left ventricle and pretty much destroyed the medial right lungfield." Robbins straightened up. "Exsanguination into the thorax was fast, less than thirty seconds, and the damage to the heart also triggered off a massive series of fibrilations."

"A heart attack." Grissom stated.

"Essentially, yes." The pathologist nodded once. "This man was dead before he hit the ground."

"We're looking for a patch of ground with a lot of blood and a fragment of bone, then." Grissom sounded strangely dissatisfied at the prospect of 'a simple murder'.

Robbins smiled briefly, a mere twitch of his lips. "Not quite, Gil," he assured. "I found something rather interesting in the wound tract--"

The inquisitive expression raced back over Grissom's face, and he leaned forwards once more, eyes focused on the single bullet hole, framed as it was by the thick, deep lines of the Y-incision. "Oh?"

"Yes, foreign matter along the entire length of the tract-- fragments of some sort of fibre, to be more precise." Robbins straightened up and turned away from the body on the table, finding what he wanted amongst the neatly laid out collection pots and laboratory equipment on the polished metal surface of a moveable trolley. "Here," A clear plastic pot with a white screw lid was selected and handed over to Grissom, who accepted it, bringing it close to his face to examine the contents clumped at the bottom of it.

"Fibres-" a statement, rather than a question, which Grissom quickly followed up with, "I found something similar on the exterior edges of the wound at the scene- mixed in with tissue and blood; too badly to identify clearly. I logged them in with Greg at the beginning of the shift."

"I cleaned up some samples and sent them up to Greg for analysis-- I'd be surprised if they weren't the same as your fibres-- however I don't believe that they are from the clothing of the victim."

"Oh?"

"I had David take samples of the all the fabrics to send to Trace as well, but by sight alone, the fibres I found in the wound appear to be light in colour; cream possibly, or white. In contrast, the victim's clothing was black and orange in colouring. The vest is one of the local community sides." Robbins nodded at the neatly folded and tagged items of clothing. "David also took up a picture of the logo on the vest."

"Good." It would have taken a score of Nobel-winning scientists a decade to figure out if Grissom was surprised by any of the information given to him by the pathologist.

"If you find anything else--"

"I'll give you a page, Gil." Robbins nodded his head. "Now, I've got to deal with the latest victim of the gang war Catherine and Sara are working on." In saying that, he turned away from the dissected corpse they were standing over and indicated a shapeless looking black body bag laid out on another autopsy table.

"Bad?" Grissom looked mildly interested; the body bag didn't have a body shape to it.

Robbins sighed. "Well, this one was found in a burnt out old Ford Cortina in an alley off the south end of the strip."

"Ah," a look of understanding broke over the night shift supervisor's face. "I'll leave you to it." Grissom made his way over to the large swing doors that led out into hte corridor and began to make his way back up to hte more familiar territory of the CSI lab.

-----

The white light source from the comparative microscope gave a smooth, bright backdrop when viewed through the eyepiece lenses and created a faint halo of shadow around the fibres laid carefully on the slide on the viewing platform. Both fibres were a pale beige colour, changing to a washed out looking brown where blood staining was still apparent. Warrick had used several different optical filters and focus settings and had managed to determine that both were organic; most likely having the same origin.

The CSI had also provisionally decided that the fibres were hairs from a canid of some description, although he was awaiting DNA typing results before setting any conclusions in stone. Most of the hairs; both those collected by Grissom at the scene, and those sent up by Doc Robbins, also had one-- in some cases two-- burnt ends; the carbonisation and destruction of the cortex-medulla boundary was quite apparent. Warrick also had a theory about the cause of the burning, one that he was going to bounce of Grissom when the senoir CSI put in an appearence.

Warrick's eyes were beginning to burn from staring down the light microscpe and the two sections of thread laid out on the slide stage were blurring and dancing in a way that had nothing to do with adjusting the fine focus dial. _I need a coffee break._ The CSI sighed and stretched as he leant back and sat up. His neck muscles popped and he grimaced slightly. _I don't get how Greg copes doing this all shift..._

Speaking of the lab technician in proximity to the need for coffee made Warrick remember that now would probably be a good time to see if he could find where Greg had hidden his latest bag of coffee in an attempt to keep it secret; something that was never as sucessful as the young man hoped.

Leaving the lab cubicle and making his way along the artifically lit corridor towards the mess room Warrick noticed that Greg's lab was empty of the rumpled looking technician-- although the muffled thudding of the cd player sitting on one of the work surfaces indicated that the absence was only temporary. The CSI picked up his pace; an absence of lab tech in the lab often meant that said lab tech was brewing coffee-- decent, drinkable coffee-- in the break room. Coffee that could be appropriated.

Pushing open the door to the break room, Warrick was disappointed to note that the messy space was deserted; except for the persistant odour from some experiment Grissom had set up by the window (a glass vivarium tank, some soil, worms and-- as far as Warrick could tell-- not much else), the background clutter and the coffee machine.

Warrick paced into the room and sourly eyed the humming coffee machine; he needed caffiene, but was not looking forward to ingesting the sludge that seemed to pass for coffee around the police building. He was beginning to agree with Catherine's theory about their boss secretly experimenting with the coffee machine. Except-- the coffee machine wasn't exuding its usual brewing odour of old socks cut with motor oil-- Warrick made his way over to the counter and the percolater and found his nose being plesantly surpised by the unmistakable smell of Blue Hawaiian coffee.

_Well, it'd be rude not to..._


End file.
